A Danger to Herself and Others(48)

“Lucy!” I shout. Now my voice is hoarse. “Lucy!”





thirty-three


When the lights come on, I’m still screaming.

Lucy!

Lucy!

Lucy!

I’m crying like a little kid, with my face screwed up and my eyes shut tight, but I can tell the lights are on because I see color through my eyelids: red and orange and yellow.

I don’t want to open my eyes.

I’m scared of what I’ll see.

Actually, I’m scared of what I won’t see.

Who I won’t see.

I feel hands on me. I hear Dr. Lightfoot’s voice say, “Put her on the bed, Stephen.”

I didn’t know Lightfoot and Stephen worked this late. Maybe they stayed late tonight because they knew what was going to happen. Or maybe it’s not actually that late. How would I know?

Stephen lifts me up—I was still crouching on the floor—and puts me on the bed. I stay curled in the same position, awkward as a rat on its back. I’m still repeating Lucy’s name but more softly now. My throat is so raw that even whispering hurts.

“Should I get a sedative?” It’s the first time I’ve heard Stephen’s voice. It’s higher pitched than I expected from such a big man. I brace myself for the prick of a needle, the manufactured sense of calm stilling my muscles, if not entirely my brain. Much to my surprise, I want it.

“No, I don’t think so,” Lightfoot answers. “We should let her feel this. This could be a breakthrough for her.”

I don’t want to feel this. I don’t know what this is, but I know I don’t like it. Numbness has never been so appealing. For the first time in my sober life—never a drink when the other kids were partying, never so much as a puff off a joint or a cigarette—I want drugs. I want something, anything, to dull what I’m feeling.

“Hannah,” Lightfoot says, sitting on the edge of my bed (where Lucy sat). “Hannah, can you hear me?”

Of course I can hear her. “What did you do with her?” I whimper.

“With who?”

“With whom,” I correct irritably. My throat hurts. “Jesus Christ, with whom. Didn’t they teach you anything in medical school?”

“Not grammar,” Lightfoot answers, and even with my eyes closed, I know she’s smiling. When I first got here, she’d have marked my grammatical correctness in her notes as a symptom. But now—now that she feels sorry for me, feels superior to me, feels like she understands me better than I understand myself—it’s nothing more than a cute affectation.

I hate Dr. Lightfoot. I open my eyes and spring to my feet.

“With Lucy!” I search the room once more, practically climbing the wall to look out the window, as though Lucy might have made herself small enough to squeeze her way out. “What did you do with Lucy?”

Stephen moves to grab me, but Lightfoot holds up her hand, stopping him.

“Who’s Lucy?” Lightfoot asks. Her voice is annoyingly calm, like she’s trying to soothe a mad dog.

“My roommate,” I answer hoarsely.

“Your roommate’s name was Agnes.”

“Not that roommate. This roommate.” I hold out my arms, gesturing to the room around me. “Lucy Quintana. Ballet dancer and bulimic.”

“Hannah, you haven’t had a roommate here.” She cocks her head to the side like she thinks I’m dumb: Why would we have given you a roommate when we said you were a danger to yourself and others?

I shake my head. Lucy was here. I felt her weight on my bed. Smelled her hair when she sat close.

“Hannah.” Lightfoot holds her hands out in front of her as she walks toward me, guarding herself against me. “You’ve been on the antipsychotics for several days. They’ve had time to take effect.”

“What are you saying?” I can barely get the words out.

“I think you know what I’m saying.”

I shake my head again, but this time I can’t stop. I can’t stop shaking. My hands, my teeth, my chin: everything trembles, everything chatters. Why do they make it so cold in this godforsaken place?

Lucy was here. Lucy was real. This is all some kind of trick.

But then I see something I didn’t notice before. Lucy’s bed, the bed across from mine, the bed I had to step around on my daily walks about the room.

It’s gone.





thirty-four


They’re trying to make me believe I’m crazy. There’s a word for it: they’re gaslighting me. We watched a movie called Gaslight in my women’s lit class, even though it didn’t really qualify as women’s lit being neither a book nor written by a woman. (We also watched Fatal Attraction and Heavenly Creatures. My high school is very progressive.) In Gaslight, a husband conspires to make his wife (Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman) believe she’s losing her mind so he can take her money. He makes her stop her studies. He moves her away from her friends. He steals a brooch so she thinks she lost it; he hides a picture and tells her she moved it. He controls the lights and tells her she’s imagining that they dim and brighten.

He wants more than her money. After all, there are other, easier ways to take your wife’s money than to make her think she’s insane. No, he’s after her sense of reality. Her sense of self. He’s shaking her to her very core. She gets him back in the end, though.